It’s always exciting when a new party bubbles up in Sweden, even if they tend to pop fairly quickly. But could a new far-left splinter party have an impact on next September’s election?
It’s always exciting when a new party bubbles up in Sweden, even if they tend to pop fairly quickly. But could a new far-left splinter party have an impact on next September’s election?
It’s always exciting when a new party bubbles up in Sweden, even if they tend to pop fairly quickly. But could a new far-left splinter party have an impact on next September’s election?
Lorena Delgado Varas and Daniel Riazat, the two MPs ousted from the Left Party over the way they have been campaigning against Israel’s attack on Gaza, on Tuesday revealed their new political vehicle, which is so far just a website called Framtidens Vänster, Future Left.
Varas and Riazat, who are keeping their seats in parliament as independents or vildar (literally “wild ones”), are calling the project “a new political alternative”, suggesting that they intend to go further than just organising protests but also to participate in elections.
On their site, they call the group “an alternative that puts people’s needs ahead of market profits and that dares to stand up to injustices – no matter where they appear”.
It lists five focus areas: socialism, feminism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism and climate justice.
In Sweden’s political system, the risk from small parties comes if they manage to attract voters in significant numbers but still fall below the 4 percent threshold, annihilating a percent or two of the vote share in the bloc to which they belong.
Nyans, the immigrant party that seized attention in the 2022 election, only got 28,352 votes in the end. Even assuming these voters otherwise would have backed parties in the left-wing bloc rather than staying home, this still wouldn’t have been enough to counter the right-wing bloc’s 46,296 vote lead. But it might have reduced their majority from 3 MPs to just one.
So is Framtidens Vänster a threat to Magdalena Andersson, the leader of the Social Democrats? Could it sabotage her chances of getting elected?
Tobias Hübinette, the co-founder of the magazine Expo, who is now based at Karlstad University, argued in a blog post that it might well be, estimating that the Left Party could lose about 1.5 percentage points from a combination of voters who back the new party and those who choose not to vote in protest at the way the conflict with Varas and Riazat has been handled.
Jonas Hinnfors, politics professor at Gothenburg University, however, doubts that they will have such a significant effect.
“Its pretty tough to start new parties. I think the safest bet is that they end up getting marginalised,” he told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper. “It might dampen enthusiasm a little for the Left Party. But it might also make the party a little more attractive to others who have partly recoiled from the harsh rhetoric that some party representatives have had.”
Delgado Varas and Riazat have certainly been doing all they can to inflict maximum damage. At a press conference on Sunday, Delgado Varas accused the Left Party’s leader Nooshi Dadgostar of changing the party out of all recognition.
“It has become harder, colder and more systematic. In terms of organisation, it has become a Stalinist organisation, but politically, it’s a Social Democratic party,” she said.
Hübinette predicted that the new party would try to form an election alliance with other pro-Palestinian groups, such as the immigrant party Nyans, and the new socialist party Solidaritet, which was founded by Björn Alling, another Left Party outcast, in 2023. But even if it succeeds in doing this, he does not expect it to be able to get more than 2.5 percent at the very most, meaning it will not pass the parliamentary threshold.
“If the 2026 election is as close as the 2022 election, this could very well mean that Framtidens Vänster will bring home the victory for the Tidö parties once again in a year’s time,” he writes.
What else has been happening in Swedish politics?
New Liberal leader refuses to rule out joining far right in government
The Liberal Party’s new leader, Simona Mohamsson, in several interviews refused to repeat the promise made by her predecessor Johan Pehrson that the Liberals will not be part of a government that includes the Sweden Democrats. In an interview on SVT’s Agenda programme, she said the party’s line had not changed, but refused to commit herself to not joining a government with SD ministers.
In an interview with the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, she said that her view of cooperation with the far-right party had changed.
“Voters should know that we are a right-wing party and that we want a right-wing prime minister. I think the cooperation we have with the Sweden Democrats today works well. Then, just like all other parties, we need to have a discussion about how we can maximise the Liberals’ influence after the next election.”
Swedish Green party keeps opposition to new nuclear
The Swedish green party’s ruling committee has backed down from its proposal to drop the party’s opposition to new nuclear power stations after the proposal generated strong internal opposition.
The party’s new programme, which its national congress is scheduled to vote through in October, continues to say that the party “is opposed” to new nuclear power stations. It does, however, drop the party’s 2013 demand that the decommissioning of all existing nuclear power stations should start “immediately”.
Instead the programme calls for nuclear power stations to be decommissioned once sufficient renewable power capacity has been built to replace them.
Secret documents left in airport toilet
Sweden’s former national security advisor Henrik Landerholm is currently on trial for forgetting classified document at a conference hotel. On Monday the Dagens Nyheter newspaper reported yet another case of forgotten documents, revealing that an unnamed official left a file containing briefing notes for Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson in a toilet at Stockholm Arlanda.
The Left Party’s foreign spokesperson Håkan Svenneling has reported Kristersson to the parliament’s Committee on the Constitution over the incident.
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